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Journal Citation Analysis

information and later reviewed and adjusted according to experts’ opi-
nions. This approach is widely used for local journal evaluations and,
moreover, often applied in research institutes as a standard for staff pro-
motion. Among them, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) journal
quality guide, produced by the ABS has attracted much attention among
business schools. In the ABS journal ranking a total of more than 800
selected journals from 22 fields are rated from 4 (indicating the highest
quality) to 1 (for the lowest quality). Opinions from experts including
journal editors and researchers, and information on journal impact and
journal submissions are considered to produce the final journal ranking.
Serenko and Bontis (2013) provide a ranking of knowledge management
and intellectual capital academic journals combining an expert survey
with journal impact methods.

6.18.4 Other Journal Ranking Indicators

Finally, several other types of indicators suggested for journal ranking pur-
poses can be found in the literature. We mention the following:
Brown (2003) developed a download metric to rank journals in the
area of accounting and finance. Download frequencies of articles were
obtained from the Social Science Research Network.
Holsapple (2008) proposed the publication power approach for identify-
ing a group of most-important (he uses the term “premier”) journals in a
field. This method takes into account the actual publication behavior of all
full-time, tenured faculty at leading universities (the benchmark researchers)
over a given (recent) period of time. The publication power of a journal is
then defined as the product of its publishing intensity and its publishing
breadth. Here, a journal’s publishing breadth is defined as the number of
benchmark researchers who have published at least one article in this jour-
nal, and the journal’s publishing intensity is the sum of the number of times
this journal has been the publication outlet across all benchmark research-
ers. By definition, the publishing breadth is never larger than the publishing
intensity. This method has been applied in (Serenko & Jiao, 2012) to pro-
vide a ranking of Information Systems (IS) journals in Canada.
Ending this section we note that, whatever the method used, this does
not need to lead to a—complete—ranking of journals. Often a classifica-
tion in first tier, second tier and so on is sufficient, and often more sensi-
ble. A three-tier classification is, for instance, applied in the Norwegian
model (Sivertsen, 2010), see Subsection 8.9.1.